


perennial

by venndaai



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Family, Gratuitous Plant Metaphors, Kid Fic, M/M, Pining, Present Tense, mix of book and show canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-11 22:34:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19935616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: Prax and Amos on the moon.Endings and beginnings; seeds that take time to sprout.





	perennial

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CypressSunn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/gifts).



> This takes some plot and worldbuilding details from the books (with tweaking), and Amos's backstory novella, but is meant to be set in the show's universe. Any distances in space or implied references to such are probably incorrect as I'm pretty bad at calculating that stuff.

The one time Prax left Ganymede, before the Incident, was a field trip in college up to one of the big orbital mirrors. They’d gotten a good view, him and twelve other graduate students, peering out a small round window at the dark rock below, dotted with a profusion of little lights like fungal spotting on the universe’s biggest leaf, and behind the moon the majesty of Jupiter, glowing with all the deadly glory befitting an ancient god. His world had looked tiny, from the outside, so far away that the famous domes weren’t even distinguishable, and Nikola had leaned against him and sighed. And that had been all the travel Prax needed. He’s never been even to Europa, where his family is from. When they moved on to Otrera, he stayed. When Nikola went to Ceres, he stayed. Ganymede was home. Until it wasn’t.

Later, he won’t be able to remember much about the journey from Io to Luna, but for the rest of his life the taste of cheese-flavored protein paste will recall flashes of memory, Alex’s lasagna shared around a communal table; Naomi showing Mei all the ship’s different systems, displayed on glowing screens; Mei pulling on his cheeks to get him up in the morning, when the gravity on his body wants to keep him in his bunk; the daily work of fixing each green panel, securing them properly this time and writing a program into the ship’s computer to regulate the balance of water and nutrients. He stretches out the work, goes slowly and gives himself unnecessary steps to complete, and lingers particularly over the tasks that give him an excuse to enter the machine shop, or call Amos up over shipboard comms and ask his advice on a bit of wiring. It’s still over too quickly. 

Approaching Luna, Prax gets a sense of deja vu. He’s reminded of the first trip he ever took away from the Jovian system, and he’s overcome for a moment by all the differences between that approach to Tycho and this gentle approach to Armstrong Station. He can see the moon growing larger. He’s not floating in the crowded hold of a freighter, mind full of nothing but death and fear, he’s strapped into a comfortable chair on the command deck, Mei secured in a booster seat next to him, her little hand squeezing his tightly. In front of each of them are viewscreens showing the approach. Luna glitters from space, all city lights and transport shuttles, a hive of activity. Below it, Earth hangs, a swirl of blue and white against the flat black of the void. Prax looks at it, and can’t really understand what he’s looking at. The birthplace and life support heart of humanity, the home of seventy-five percent of the species. 

Mei looks at Earth and then dismisses it for the more interesting Luna. She watches the flight of shuttles across the surface of the moon, absorbed. “It’s shiny,” she says to Amos, in the chair on her other side, and Amos says, “Sure is.”

On the station they’re escorted directly through a tube to the ground elevator, and Prax is grateful for it, the extra minutes of dark enclosed spaces with only a few unfamiliar faces. The trip down the elevator is so gentle, compared to the acrobatics he’s endured lately in the Roci. But they barely take a step off the elevator into a large, glitteringly clean spaceport before they’re swarmed by reporters, well-wishers, and gawkers. Some are shouting questions of Undersecretary Avasarala; Sergeant Draper glares at them and they back off. Some push up to Holden, his face famous across the system, and he smiles at them and gives them soundbites. Some approach Prax and Mei, reporters asking questions, people just wanting to touch them, to be part of their story. Holden redirects the attention with the skill of the born showman, and Amos takes care of the rest, putting a gentle yet heavy hand on the shoulders that come too close. Prax barely notices any of it. His world is Mei, the teddy bear she clutches close to her chest, her wobbling steps as she adjusts to Luna’s .16 g. Prax himself barely notices the gravity, though six months ago he’d have felt constrained under it. Six months ago he hadn’t experienced continuous 2g burns. Now with Mei at his side, he feels like he’s floating. Odd, that he was so heavy on Tycho Station, and so light now that something much larger is under his feet. The subconscious finds it hard to grasp.

“Doc,” Amos says, and he looks up. They’re in the middle of a vast promenade, crowds all around, and he has to fight back an urge to pick Mei up, hold her close to make sure she’s not swept away. “Doc, the reporters want a couple words, then they’ll clear off.” 

“Oh,” he says, “all right,” and he does pick up Mei then. In microgravity she weighs almost nothing, but she’s bigger than she was before, he still has to adjust his grip to account for it. Mei hides her face behind the teddy bear. 

How is Mei doing, Doctor Meng? the reporters and their floating cameras ask. 

She’s gone through a lot, but she’ll be all right. She’s very tough. 

How do you feel now that you’ve found her?

A stupid question, but he smiles and says, Happy. I’m the happiest person in the world right now.

Where will you and Mei be going next?

The question blindsides him, shifts the gravity under his feet. For the last three months, his life has existed on a straight line, an arrow from him to the moment he finds Mei. He was a plant twisting towards a singular sun. Now that line has collapsed, and he exists in three-dimensional space once more. 

“I’ll have to see where Mei wants to go,” he says finally, still smiling widely, and he lifts her up and asks her, “Where would you like to go, baby?”

“To the bathroom,” she says firmly, and everyone laughs, and he manages to make his escape.

Amos helps them find the bathroom, and when Prax emerges he’s still there. Mei pushes off the handrail and launches herself into his arms. “The sinks have water here,” she tells him.

“They do,” he agrees. “Comes from all the way out in the asteroid belt.” 

Prax ought to feel nervous again, with Mei not within arm’s reach, but seeing her there in Amos’s arms makes him feel even safer than when she’s in his own. He knows, all the way through, the way a child knows things, certain and safe, that no harm can come to Mei when she’s got her arms wrapped around Amos’s neck. There’s no safer place for her in the galaxy.

The logical adult scientist part of him knows this isn’t true, remembers Amos taking a bullet meant for him, knows the man’s not invincible. But it doesn’t change how he feels. Mei is safe.

She points to the nearest gleaming white wall, the strip of green running down the middle. “Nephrolepsis exaltata,” she proclaims.

He takes a closer look at the inset bed of soil, the serrated sword-shaped leaflets of the fern. Unlike the Roci, the walls here aren’t designed to serve as floors in an emergency. Luna is never going to change direction under thrust. The moon’s gravity keeps the floor below them and the walls to the sides. “Your daddy showed me this one,” Amos says. “Boston fern, right?” 

Prax nods.

“I went to Boston once,” Amos says. “Not a bad place.” 

Prax remembers showing Amos a picture of the fern. The memories jumble around in his head, a file cabinet flung open and tossed about by stress and fatigue.

It’s a week out from Ganymede, from the dead ruins of Ganymede, and Prax is sitting on Amos’s bunk, talking about plants. He brings up pictures on his tablet, talks and talks about air purifiers and water ratios until his throat hurts, until Amos says “Hey,” and puts his hand on Prax’s shoulder, until Prax sobs and shakes in Amos’s arms, until Amos says, “What do you need?”, looking at him with eyes that say _let me help_ , and Prax replies, “I want to hurt myself. Or have sex, maybe. I’m- overloaded, I think.”

“Not sure I can help with either of those, doc,” Amos says. 

“Oh,” and Prax feels himself going red. “I’m sorry, I didn’t-”

“It’s not that I’d turn you down, if we were in a bar,” Amos explains, in the level tones of someone just laying the facts on the table. “I just don’t have sex that might get complicated later.”

“Why not?” Prax finds himself asking. “All human interaction is a complex system. You can’t make it simple by removing one variable.”

Prax can see Amos thinking it over, before he nods. There’s a weird heady rush to it. No one has ever really listened to him the way Amos does. Other scientists listen to him only long enough to get the information they need, or to think up something to say back. People who aren’t scientists tuned him out. Mei listened- listens, but she didn’t- doesn’t- understand. Amos takes in everything Prax says without a hint of mockery, and thinks about it. 

“That’s right enough,” he says at last. “It’s just that I know I’m not good with… boundaries, I guess. And sex is something where boundaries are real important. So I keep work and fun separate.”

“Okay,” Prax says, his exhausted brain trying to puzzle it out. Whether Amos just confessed to being a bad partner, or a potential abuser, or if he’s trying to tell Prax something else. He remembers Amos’s fists, ramming into the body of a starving man. The casual violence Prax has seen him deal out. Wonders what it means that Prax still wants him. Remembers his own hand on Amos’s shoulder, shouting “What’s wrong with you?” and the unexpected rush of satisfaction when Amos stopped- when Amos listened to _him_ , when no one ever listened to him. Remembers Amos saving his life.

“Think I understood some of what you were saying with the plants, doc. Want to come down to the machine shop and see if we can rig up some panels?”

“Yes,” Prax says, wiping at his eyes.

He stands up, muscles straining under the .3G, except he’s not really in a spaceship under thrust, he’s on Luna, and he pushes himself forward farther than he meant to, nearly crashes into Amos, except Amos just puts out a hand and gently pushes him back to the ground. His other hand is still on Mei’s back, so big it almost wraps all around her. 

“You all right?” Amos asks, and there’s something new in his voice, a hesitancy that wasn’t there before Io. Prax has been listening to it grow, these past few weeks. A seedling that he can’t yet identify. 

“Just tired,” Prax says, and feels himself smile. Amos keeps looking at him, still worried. 

“Let’s find somewhere quiet to hole up til the paparazzi clear off,” Amos suggests. He looks at Mei. “You want daddy?”

She shakes her head. “You walk funny,” she says, with a giggle.

It’s true, Prax observes, as Amos leads them along the concourse. Under microgravity, the Earther’s origins are unmistakable. He bounds along with a loping stride, while Prax pushes off and floats next to him. 

Looking around for the first time, Prax sees that most of the people here move like Amos, or even more oddly than him. Luna has a large, stable population, he remembers hearing, but most of the people in this port are probably Earthers. 

Amos leads them unerringly to a bar, but a nice bar, people chatting over what looks like nice food. There’s private booths, and Prax sinks into the quiet of one, Mei bouncing over to him to tell him she wants peanuts. 

Amos orders the peanuts, and two beers. 

“Have you been here before?” Prax asks. He seems so confident, so at home. 

Amos laughs. “The ground? Nah. Went through Luna Station, when I was leaving Earth. Haven’t been back here since.

Prax tickles Mei. She bats his hands away, snorting. “Are you going to go downwell? While you’re here?”

Amos shakes his head. “Told you,” he says. “I died. It’d be… awkward, going back.”

It shouldn’t make Prax happy, that Amos doesn’t want to go somewhere he, Prax, is banned from by the laws of gravity.

_Where will you and Mei be going next?_

Mei gets her peanuts, from a waiter who’s kind enough to pretend he doesn’t recognize her, and Prax and Amos get their beers in plastic bulbs, and they talk, or at least Mei talks, and Prax and Amos fill in the gaps when she pauses for breath. Prax tries to enjoy the weightlessness of happiness, tries to ignore the anxiety creeping in around the edges, the fear of a future end point to this happiness. 

The others find them in ones or twos, the travelling group reassembling one final time. Mei gets quieter as the group grows, though she’s certainly familiar with all of them by now. That’ll be a good story to embarrass her with when she’s older, he thinks, the story of how she once played hide and go seek with the UN Secretary-General. How a Martian Marine tossed her in the air like a zeeball. His heart constricts painfully, because he’s out of the habit of imagining Mei’s future. She has one. They have one, even if he’s having trouble pinning it down exactly.

It’s a cheerful final meal, but it does feel final. Secretary-General Avasarala will be returning to Earth, of course, after a few more meetings on Luna. She makes Prax promise to stay in touch. Sergeant Draper is going back to Mars. Captain Holden is going down to Earth to visit his family, and then taking the Rocinante- anywhere we can get paid for taking her, he says with a laugh, not looking at Naomi, who’s going to Tycho Station, for reasons Prax didn’t catch and she seems reluctant to discuss at the table with the Secretary-General. “I’ll just keep flying the Roci until someone makes me stop,” Alex says. Which leaves- Amos, who doesn’t broach the topic, just smiles and laughs at the appropriate points in the conversation, and doesn’t make eye contact with Naomi either. And Prax and Mei. 

“Go back to Ganymede,” Secretary-General Avasarala orders him briskly. “The station has to be rebuilt, the farms particularly if the Jovian System’s going to get back to any semblance of order. They’ll need tough b- people like you. I’m putting together a reconstruction mission. I can offer you a job.”

Prax has never before thought of himself as tough, but maybe he is, now.

He thinks about going back. That first day, Mei asked if they could go home, and he had to tell her that home wasn’t there any more. The apartment where they’d lived, Mei’s school, the doctor’s office, the labs, they were all crushed under fallen debris, or at least frozen, the atmosphere that had once provided life now vented into space, the people who’d lived there gone or dead. He didn’t tell her that, just that bad things had happened and home was just the two of them, now. He told all the kids that Ganymede was gone, when they asked, but that they’d be reunited with their families, and they had been, not all of them with parents but with relatives somewhere in the system, located at great speed while the Rocinante sped sunwards. They’re all gone now. Maybe some of them will be going back to Ganymede, eventually.

That night they’re given luxurious hotel bedrooms. The beds are enclosed pods, extremely comfortable but they remind Mei of the container she was kept in and she crawls into bed with him, crying. He can’t sleep either, so after half an hour he gets up and carries her into the corridor, presses the button on the room across the hall. Amos opens it, naked except for a towel awkwardly wrapped around his waist. “Come on in,” he says, no irritation in his voice at all. Once they’re inside, he disappears into the tiny bathroom, emerges quickly in boxers and an old soft t-shirt. Prax needs to stop looking. He puts Mei down carefully on the floor, sits down next to her. Amos sits down too, casual and relaxed, and they all three of them sit there on that thickly carpeted floor.

“Kinda weird to be here,” Amos says quietly. Prax looks at him. In the low light his pale eyes are dark and glittering. 

“What do you mean?” Prax asks.

“Used to look up at Luna a lot,” Amos says. “All the kids did. It was where the rich people went. Or if you won the lottery. We’d see ships taking off from the spaceport every night. These bright gold trails against the black sky.”

Prax thinks about being young, and looking up, no miles of tunnels overhead, just breathable atmosphere, nothing solid between you and the stars. 

“Lot of ways I could have died, before we got here,” Amos says. “I’m glad I didn’t.”

“Me too,” Prax says, and leans against his broad shoulder, and listens to the sound of the air recycling system until he slowly drifts off to sleep. 

In the morning over breakfast he tells his shipmates, “Mei and I are going back to Ganymede.”

Holden nods like he’d been expecting that. “We’ll take you,” he says, “it’s not far out of the way to Tycho, if we leave soon.” Alex nods. Amos nods too, and doesn’t say anything. 

“Thank you,” Prax says, “but it’s better if we go with the UN relief fleet. It’ll give me time to get to know the people I’ll be working with, and I can start working while we travel.”

“Makes sense,” Holden says. “Well, we’ll miss you, Prax.” He’s smiling.

What else can Prax do? What other answer is there? Ganymede is all he’s ever had besides Mei. Besides a bunk on a starship and a few green panels, but Mei needs school and weekly doctor’s appointments, not the danger and radiation poisoning of the most infamous gunship in the solar system. 

Though Ganymede’s proof that nowhere is really safe. 

“And we sure will miss you, sweetheart,” Alex says to Mei. “Do you have a hug for Uncle Alex?” 

She does. 

“Tell us when you’re leaving,” Naomi says. “We’ll see you off.”

He promises that he will.

They stand up, ready to start their busy days. Prax murmurs goodbyes. He focuses on Mei, who seems to be making a sculpture out of protein paste. It’s getting in her hair. 

“Hey,” Amos says. Prax looks up. The others are gone, but Amos is still sitting there, clean plate in front of him, napkin in his big hands. “Want to give me those sticky hands?” He’s talking to Mei. 

She offers him her hands and he wipes them off carefully. 

“Thanks,” Prax says. His throat hurts. 

“Come with me,” he wants to say, but he can’t. Amos might be a violent man, but he has never been anything but kind to Prax, even when Prax just needed more and more from him and gave nothing in return. Prax desperately doesn’t want to see Amos try to be kind, refusing a demand that he abandon his entire life for something he’s shown no signs of wanting. 

“Doc,” Amos says, and his hand reaches out to cup Prax’s cheek. It’s a friendly, casual gesture, one Prax has seen him use freely on his crewmates, but Prax must react to it wrong, must lean a little too desperately into the contact, because Amos goes still, hand frozen in place. His eyes are very wide, and very blue. Prax gets the oddest sensation that this man, this big muscular Earther with his dense bones, is at this moment as fragile as an _adiantum_ frond. That if Prax touches him the wrong way, he’ll brown at the edges and curl up. 

Prax puts his hand over Amos’s. Pulls it down to the table, unresisting. Squeezes. “Thank you for everything,” Prax says. 

What he doesn’t anticipate is that when Mei figures out that Amos isn’t coming home with them, she screams for two hours.

Prax used to think he knew what his ‘type’ was. Other socially awkward scientists like him. That was what made sense. Nikola made sense. When the flaws in their marriage had made themselves known, when she’d left, he’d acknowledged that he might not have narrowed his parameters enough. That his mistake had been in leaving out the qualifying term “male”. 

In the months following Luna, he’s forced to admit to himself that his entire string was wrong from the start. Improbable as it would seem to his younger self, it turns out his ‘type’ is ‘Earth man who could lift me with one hand under half a G’. The worst part is, he doesn’t know if he’s looking too much at the Earth sailors on his ship because they’re the type he was always secretly interested in, or if it’s just that they now remind him of Amos. _Cascade_ , he thinks, ruefully. Maybe he could have lived his whole life without this new awareness, if events hadn’t set off a chain reaction in his heart and endocrine system. 

There are a few other children on the ship. Other refugee families who had fled all the way to Luna, who are willing to share in the hard work of rebuilding their world. Mei plays tag with them, bouncing off the walls as the ship glides under the gentlest of thrust. 

Prax has the Rocinante’s radio frequency, and he thinks about calling. Charts out their probable trajectory, tries to calculate the distances in his head each artificial evening, until the two points diverge far enough that lag would make any conversation impossible.

He records video messages to send to his parents, once a week, and to Secretary-General Avasarala, because he has the vague impression that’s part of his job, actually. But not to the Rocinante.

Ganymede is his world, where he was born and grew and first got high and first fell in love, where his daughter was born. It’s a dead world now, and he shivers when he thinks about the miles of tunnels cold and littered with the frozen corpses of humans and plants alike. But the tunnels that have been repressurized are crowded and humming with light and life. Mei runs along them every day after school, Prax struggling to keep up, both of them laughing. 

He sends a message, at last, because Mei won’t stop begging to see Amos again. He records it with Mei, addresses it to the whole crew and edits together a little tour of the restored section. He and Mei spend ten minutes giving a little presentation on the new system of filtration plants. 

Prax sends it, and ten minutes later is watching the news feeds give a confused report on a terrible disaster out at the Ring, a disaster apparently caused by the crew of the Rocinante.

Sitting on his temporary cot in the temporary housing, looking at the tiny screen of his tablet, Prax feels Ganymede recede away under and above him, everything going distant. Part of him is here, and part of him is two billion miles away, an hour in the past, feeling the crushing pressure of high G burn, the adrenaline and nausea of terror. 

In that moment that seems to stretch for a century, he arrives at a clear and undeniable revelation. Too late. 

The news reports take another fifteen minutes to agree that the Rocinante has gone through the Ring. Prax feels his mind fixate on the screen, on the stream of information, just like it did when Mei was missing, but she’s not missing any more, she’s here, and he has to put his tablet down and go put her to bed in her own small cot next to his. 

“When will we get a message back?” she asks, excitedly, and he swallows and says he doesn’t know exactly, but it won’t be until the morning, at least. 

“Sleep well, baby,” he says, and kisses her forehead, and reminds himself that he hasn’t just lost everything again; only one thing, and not the most important thing. He’ll survive this. He’s tough, now.

He and Mei do get a response, eventually. Seven days later, a video file in his inbox with a note attached, explaining that it was sent from the Thomas Prince, a UN ship, that just returned today through the gate; the note is signed by an Anna Volovodov, who adds that she hopes he is doing well and she wants him to know his friends are heroes. 

Prax watches the video himself while Mei is at school, and then plays it again for her when she gets home. It’s from Amos. There are dark bruises on his face, and his eyes are bloodshot. Prax recognizes the background as the crew quarters; Amos is sitting on his bunk. 

“Hey Doc,” he says. “Hey pumpkin. Sorry I couldn’t get back to you earlier. Bunch of crazy shit’s gone down, but we made it through all right. Turns out there’s a bunch more gates on this side, and they lead to all kinds of new planets. Captain wants to check them out. So I guess that’s what we’re gonna be doing. Naomi’s back, and Bobbie’s riding along with us too. Feels like old times.” He’s smiling, but there’s something lost in his eyes. “I don’t know when we’ll be back, or if we’ll be able to send any messages, for a while, so I just wanted to say it meant a lot, hearing from you both.” He pauses, and then just looks at the camera, for a while, like he’s run out of things to say. Prax looks back. Silently pleading with him not to end the recording. “The panels got a bit smashed up again during the excitement,” Amos says at last. “But I’m gonna get them fixed. Don’t worry about it.” Pause again. Then Amos reaches out, and his fingertips brush the camera. Mei puts her hand flat against the screen, trying to touch him. Just like Prax did, when he watched it the first time. 

Then the recording ends.

Ganymede’s resurrection is a slow process. The mirrors are a high priority, but they’re not Prax’s problem, there are a lot of engineers working on that. He has his own team, people who listen to him, and they get the air and water recycling systems up and running first, then start growing the easiest of the staple crops in tanks brought over from the ships. 

Six months in, the first repaired mirror is launched into orbit, and the first repaired agricultural dome is repressurized. 

At the end of the first year, Prax’s own hybrid maize is growing in long waving rows across an entire dome section, and he and Mei have their own permanent apartment, with running water. 

At the end of the second year, Mei’s school is large enough to start separating the kids by year again. 

At the end of the third year, Prax and Mei have just started eating dinner- spring rolls with homegrown tofu- when the door to their apartment chimes, and Prax looks at the security feed to see a compact Earther with pale hair and skin and eyes, standing outside their door. 

He goes to the door. He presses the button to slide it open. 

Amos looks different, but it might be the beard. He looks lost, standing there on the doorstep, awkward, in an uncharacteristically bulky jacket. He doesn’t look any less beautiful than he did the last day Prax saw him.

“We decided to all go home for a bit,” Amos says. The uncertainty, the doubt, shines out of his voice, his eyes, his posture. This man who was such a rock of certainty, reminding Prax who he was, what he was doing, whenever he got lost. “This was all I could think of,” Amos says, and Prax wants, desperately, to kiss him right then and there. Would do so, except that Mei has launched herself straight at Amos’s center of mass and is crashing into him, nearly knocking him off of his feet. 

“You left for so long,” Mei says, “I hate you,” but she clings to him tightly. 

“I’m sorry,” Amos says. “I guess I was kind of an idiot.”

“Come in,” Prax says, and Amos does.  
  
"We're eating dinner," Prax says. "Would you like some? Have you eaten?"

"No, daddy," Mei says, frowning, "I have to show him the apartment first."

"You can do that after we've finished eating," Prax points out, but he already knows his words will have no effect. Mei has a death grip on Amos's hand, and she's dragging him off down the little corridor towards her room. Prax sighs, and lays out a third place at the table. He nearly breaks the plate, because his hand is shaking. He leans against the plaster-coated wall of the apartment and feels tears well up in the corners of his eyes. 

By the time Mei and Amos come back, Prax has the plate loaded up with food and a glass filled with wine from the only bottle in the apartment. He'd gotten the bottle from a visiting UN scientist in exchange for one of his soybeans. Nobody's growing grapes on Ganymede yet, and tofu-whey-based-alcohol isn't really a satisfactory replacement in his opinion. 

"You don't have to eat if you're not hungry," Prax says, and Amos looks at him with those wide pale eyes, then looks at the food, then back to Prax. 

"Thank you," he says, and sits, and eats, and Prax watches him, not touching his own food, and he wants to cry again. 

Amos finishes the food. He doesn't seem to know what to say, and Prax certainly doesn't, so they end up sitting on the couch, watching time-lagged Earth children's programming, Mei talking to Amos the whole time about which characters are her favorite, describing the plots of past episodes. 

Prax isn't at all sure how much time has passed when he suddenly blinks and realizes Mei is quiet. She's curled against Amos's arm, her eyes closed and her breathing regular. 

"I thought she wouldn't remember me," Amos says, very quiet.

"You saved her life," Prax says, incredulous. "You rescued her. Even if she never saw you again she'd never forget you." 

Amos looks down at the small body between them. "Yeah?"

"Never," Prax says. "Not for the rest of her life." His shoulders are shaking again. He takes a deeper breath.

"I don't get scared," Amos says, still looking at Mei, still quiet, matter of fact. "Something switched it off when I was younger than her. I ever tell you that?"

"Not in so many words," Prax says. 

"I think if I did get scared, she'd scare the hell out of me," Amos says. "Instead I'm kind of confused, you know? I don't know what the right thing to do is. She doesn't need someone like me around, not when there's no bad guys to shoot." 

"I want you to stay," Prax says, too fast. He tries to slow down. "I don't... I don't know what the right thing is either, but I want you to stay."

"Well," Amos says, "I got nowhere else to be."

Prax picks Mei up. She stirs a little, and he whispers, "Say goodnight to Amos, honey."

"Night, Amos," she murmurs sleepily.

"Goodnight," Amos says, and gives her a little wave. 

Prax floats her down to her room, and zips her into bed. Like always, he kisses her goodnight and says, "See you in the morning, honey."

She mutters something inaudible. He kisses her forehead again, and hovers in the doorway of her room for a long moment before pushing himself back out into the common space. Amos is still sitting on the couch. 

"I'd like to kiss you," Prax says, because it suddenly occurs to him that Amos might not know.

Amos looks up at him. 

"I figured that out," he says. "I don't really get why, though."

"Like I said," Prax says. "Even if I never saw you again."

Amos is quiet. Prax sits down next to him on the couch. 

"I haven't kissed somebody I cared about since I was fifteen," Amos says.

"That's okay," Prax says. "I'll be okay if we don't. It's fine."

He wants to kiss Amos. He wants Amos to kiss him back, and hold him at night when the station is too quiet and Mei's room is too far away and all he can see behind his eyelids are the dead bodies from the secret lab and the blue flaring eyes of the protomolecule monster. He wants someone to help him raise Mei, or at least someone he can tell when he feels so weak and scared and like he can't be a good father for one more day. 

But he'll be okay without that. He'll be okay as long as Ganymede's mirrors stay spinning in the sky, as long as Mei keeps learning the names of new plants and running laughing through corridors of living thriving green. As long as he doesn't have to hear from the news that the _Rocinante_ 's been smashed into atoms in the crossfire of another crazy war.

"Doc," Amos says, "come here." 

Kissing him feels like that first moment of EVA on the outside of the Rocinante. The euphoria of drowning in the universe. His beard scratches Prax's face a little, but he doesn't mind. 

When Amos carefully pulls back, Prax says, "I think I'm scared enough for both of us."

"It's okay," Amos says. "We'll figure it out."


End file.
